Delirium

My next New Year's resolution will be to avoid watching any more Robby D.- directed porn at all costs, but till then I'm stuck catching up with many a clunker from the "award-winning" (that's the kiss of death) Adult director's repertoire. "Delirium" was made for Vivid Video and other than omitting dialog entirely has no redeeming features.

It stars Dayton, her pantomime acting truly awful, as a mad lady who keeps appearing in either a bar or a diner hallucinating the presence of a beautiful fetish damsel bound and gagged, latter played by real-life superstar fetish model Jewell Marceau. Robby's gimmick of exploiting both hardcore porn and the popular niche soft-core genre of bondage/fetish doesn't work at all.

That's because his notion of filmmaking, as he was transitioning from gonzo crap to the dull storytelling of his hundreds of more recent Digital Playground programmers, is more in the music-video school than what they teach at USC or NYU. Repetitive, pointless scenes unfold merely to cram in explicit sex as well as Jewell's beauty, filled with tons of random black & white sequences. Perhaps Robby did see and was inspired by various landmark experimental movies in film school, say Lindsay Anderson's brilliant "if..." dating back to 1968, but I doubt it.

Besides the useless casting of Dayton, we get Sydnee Steele, soon to become a huge Wicked Pictures star, wasted as a customer at the diner who gets humped by manager Dale DaBone, plus the obscure Euro Porn star (best known for her riff on "La Femme Nikita") Tavalia Griffin servicing co-worker Derrick Lane while nutsy Dayton merely watches in their office's reception area. I kept hoping Derrick's pal Raquel Darrian would show up, but no such luck -Vivid opted for no-talent Dayton instead, ensuring this video would attain landfill-worthy obscurity.

Fortuantely brief (running time under 80 minutes like so many Vivid videos back in the day), it features a cornball fantasy ending that I've seen trotted out countless times before, derived no doubt from a fondness for Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" or "Night Gallery".